The New Era of the Stock Market with Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman | All-In Summit 2025

The session opens with an introduction that frames Nasdaq's recent performance: shares are described as up 14% year to date, up 40% over the last year, and more than doubled, "up over 100%", over five years. The introduction presents Adena Friedman as an influential figure in finance and a dealmaker who "transformed NASDAQ into a global tech powerhouse," before she is welcomed on stage as Nasdaq's CEO.

After some light talk about the earlier sessions, where the response declines to name a favorite speaker because "At NASDAQ, we don't pick favorites," the interviewer asks a basic question: what does Nasdaq do beyond the stock market most people know? The answer describes growth from the core market business. As transcribed, the company had "about two and a half million dollars in revenue" at the start of the CEO tenure and "a little over two and a half billion dollars of EBITDA" by the end of last year. The transcript does not clarify whether the first figure was misspoken or mistranscribed.

The business is laid out as three pillars. The first is market infrastructure: Nasdaq calls itself "an architect of modern markets," supplying technology to its own 17 markets and selling it to 135 other markets worldwide. The second is "powering that innovation economy," which includes listed companies such as Arm and an index business with about $700 billion in assets under management tied to those companies. The third is "building trust across the financial system" through anti-financial-crime technology, market surveillance and other tools for banks and broker-dealers.

That morning, Nasdaq had announced that it would bring tokenization into its market. The stated aim is for tokenized equities to trade "not in a side sleeve, but actually in the core markets." The interviewer asks whether the goal is round-the-clock trading every day of the year. The answer is more cautious. Nasdaq had already announced a move to 24-hour trading five days a week, but weekends are "Not for equities yet," because "we're walking before we run."